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The Loki of ‘Thor’ is a confused, damaged prince, and the Loki of Avengers is somebody who understands his own power, understands his own anger, and is able to probably suppress it, Loki is the God of Mischief, and someone whose actions are very, very difficult for the Avengers to pin down.
Tom Hiddleston

He’s a shape shifter, he is intelligent, he has strategic gifts, but he also has reservoirs of pain.There’s [also] a degree of disappearing and reappearing, mind control, and self duplication, which throws a spinner in the works of people.
Tom Hiddleston (about Loki)

So I’m excited. I mean, we’ve got so much more to do and the great thing about Thor is it’s Thor the comic, Thor the character opens up a whole other world. It’s a fantasy world, it’s a sci-fi world, it’s its own special thing that’s separate from the Iron Man universe and all the more Earthbound superhero stuff. Who knows where we’re going to go in Thor 2, man? It’s exciting! We start in September!
Tom Hiddleston

So I hope you can see that he’s not the same guy. I was trying to really preserve the psychological truth of that motivation. There was still this reservoir of pain bubbling away at the center of him.
Tom Hiddleston ( about Loki )

Joss saw an early cut of Thor and because he saw Thor and because he liked it is the reason I’m the bad guy in this, because he found it interesting and poignant and complex and it’s really up his street, as a character. And we wanted to take him further. The thing that I was very disciplined about was trying to expand his villainy into something much more feral and dangerous, which Joss was really pushing it towards. But, while doing that, never spilling into something two-dimensional and trying to retain the sort of spiritual complexity at the heart of him. So it never seemed like he was just an anarchist. Loki is not the Joker. He’s a different beast. There’s a much more sort of complicated psychological motivation. It’s all really human. The Joker is just chaos.
Tom Hiddleston (about Loki )

I think there’s an element of not giving a shit anymore. I think he’s let go, certainly, of his need for the affection or pride of Odin. There’s a bit where Thor says, “We all mourned! Our father…” and Loki interrupts him and says, “YOUR father.” And it’s that sense of don’t include me in this anymore. I have no relation or connection to you. It’s his way of saying I’ve let go, I’m gone, I’m on the outside of the fence, I’m happy here, I don’t want to come back in. So that whole thing of trying to please his father is gone… I think we all see ourselves as the heroes in our own lives, so everybody is. He’s the protagonist in this movie, the motion picture of Loki’s life, he’s starring as Loki.
Tom Hiddleston ( about Loki )

Oh yeah! In the heart of Loki there is the heart of a lost child and around it he’s wrapped in a cloak of hatred and anger and pain and enormous power. But I think it’s much more exciting if I think there’s always a possibility, because then it makes him three-dimensional, it makes him complex, and you hope some people in the audience are fighting for that. It’s part of Thor’s motivation. It’s part of what makes Thor a good character, because Thor is fighting for his brother back. He wants his brother! He appeals to their childhood in this film, he says, “We fought together, played together. Do you remember none of that?” And Loki’s response is, “I remember a shadow.” So I hope that somewhere down the line – I haven’t seen a script for Thor 2 – I hope that somewhere in Thor 2 that’s something that is expanded on. I keep finding myself saying, I can’t remember who said it, but, “The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference” and Loki is not indifferent to Thor. Loki hates Thor, which must mean that underneath that he still loves him.
Tom Hiddleston ( on Loki )

I don’t think anybody is. I don’t think anyone, until their soul leaves their body, is passed the point of no return. And that’s what’s so fascinating about Loki in the comics and in the course of Scandinavian mythology, he’s constantly re-crossing that line, and he’s brought back into the fold, he’s forgiven, he forgives himself, and he goes off and does something equally appalling one more time. And that’s why he was incarnated as the God of Mischief. That’s his inclination, that’s his predisposition. He will always fall. In a way he’s an emblem of our capacity for fallibility. No matter how many times you forgive him, he’ll always reoffend. But I hope that there is redemption, a glimmer of redemption within him, because I think that’s exciting! I think that’s exciting for me to play, exciting for Chris.
Tom Hiddleston (on Loki)

And, really, he’s a kind of cocktail of psychological damage because he finds out late in life…the narrative of his life story is a lie, that he was, in fact, the bastard child of a monster, the mortal enemy of the royal family of Asgard. He was neglected, left out in the cold, then adopted, then lied to, then betrayed and all of that hardens and calcifies into an enormous anger, sadness and hatred. Basically, the motivation I think is Loki still has his expectation to rule, that that’s his purpose. If he’ll never rule Asgard, if he’ll never rule Jotunheim – because he tried to destroy it – so he’s come down to Earth to subjugate humanity and rule this planet. So if he has nowhere to belong in the universe, he can make the Earth belong to him. Some kind of self-esteem and identity…it’s all woefully misguided.
Tom Hiddleston (on Loki)

Loki was obviously born to be king of Jotunheim and he only finds that out about halfway through Thor. But then because of what happens in Thor and the revelations of his lineage and geniality, there is a sense of intense betrayal at the heart of him, and that’s where, as you say, he went completely mentally, psychologically off base.
Tom Hiddleston (on Loki )